Doggedly searching for the crux of the biscuit.
Being a crusty old contrarian, I have previously bemoaned - and will surely bemoan in the future - the internet's role in enabling ever more egregious spelling and grammar errors in ever greater quantities. "Pah!" cries the loyal opposition. "Languages evolve and you are merely wallowing in neo-Luddism with your bourgeois, pre-internet, crypto-fascist, prescriptive rules of English. its ok as long as people understand you...and like, not capitilizeing and shit...and useing lots and lots of these dot things...why do you care anyway?!?!? LOL!!!"
"Don't you 'Pah' me, whippersnappers," I retort. "That shit ain't evolution, it's laziness and those dots are ellipses, by the way." Well, the conversation has never actually gone quite like that, but the general sentiment is there. Why does it bug me so? Heck, I don't know. It just does and fiercely so. Happily, though, it isn't just me.
The argument goes that the spelling of English words is, by and large, "irrational." Why is there a silent "p" in "receipt" and not in "deceit"? Well, the quick answer is: life's a pain sometimes; stop whining; if you don't like it, go and speak German. In any case, if you try to reform the spelling of English along "rational" lines, you discover quite quickly that there is no way of doing it.
It seems to me that people just resent having to learn things. "How do you explain to an eight-year-old that the word 'yacht' has all these strange letters in it?" a chap once asked me, on the Jeremy Vine Show. This seemed an unanswerable question at the time. It was only afterwards that I worked out my objection to it. Why should the comprehension level of an eight-year-old be our standard for anything?
In the spirit of full disclosure, I should note that I felt it necessary to make one small punctuation revision to that passage. Anyhow, nine months have passed since I listed my original Ten Grammandments, and every reader should appreciate the restraint I have exhibited in the interim, particularly since spambots began sending purposefully misspelled messages to evade my Bayesian filter, driving linguistic bamboo shoots into my cerebral cortex. A lesser apostropher would have been perched on a belltower with a rifle months ago. I still haven't taken the thing out of its box yet, but one more ho!t sitcky tean hore in my inbox and all bets are off.
Accordingly, in order to release a little pressure and spare innocent bystanders, allow me to add just two short items to the list:
11. Separate: s-e-p-a-r-a-t-e. Desperate: d-e-s-p-e-r-a-t-e. See the difference?
12. When you are nauseated, you are sick to your stomach. When you are nauseous, you are making other people sick to their stomachs.*
[heavy sigh] Alright, I'm probably good through the end of the year now.
*Yes, yes, I know some guides and dictionaries have abdicated their duties and declared the sickened nauseous to be on equal footing with the sickening nauseous because the former usage is now far more common than the latter. Well, you know what I say to that: Pah! People with lice used to be far more common than people without, and we didn't just go traipsing about declaring that state of affairs peachy.
Update (7:34 am): I can't believe I didn't make this a part of Grammandment 11. In the comments, wasmyth points out another one that probably exceeds both separate and desperate. "Definitely" comes from the same Latin root as "finite," so please, people, no instances of the letter a anywhere in that word, even if your name is Nate.
TrackBack[twitch]
Oh god yes, that deserves an entry all its own...
Posted by: apostropher at July 19, 2004 07:21 AMIsn't it correct to say, I feel nauseous?
Anyway, I find this most rediculous. *twitch* *twitch*
Posted by: fiend at July 19, 2004 10:25 AMIsn't it correct to say, I feel nauseous?
Depends on what you're trying to say, now doesn't it?
Posted by: apostropher at July 19, 2004 01:08 PMJoyous day! Another Bush-hating grammar Nazi. In response to your inquiry, it looks like somebody used one of your images in a comment on one of my entries. I also linked to some of the same pages you linked to, but in different entries.
If you find this so-called image stealing an evil practice I'll gladly remove it. Meanwhile, very happy to have found your page, will advertise it legitimately in the future.
Posted by: Evie at July 19, 2004 01:19 PMAlso, "irregardless" isn't a word, regardless of the fact that dictionary.com (spineless in both the literal and figurative sense now) has caved to popular pressure and dignified it with an entry. Pah!
Posted by: Evie at July 19, 2004 01:23 PMHere are mine:
'Beg the question' does not mean what 'raise the question' means. One begs the question when, during an argument, one supposes as a premise something that is under debate. For example, asserting that life begins at conception begs the question in a debate about abortion, since most of one side of the debate disagrees.
'Ad hominem' does not mean insulting. One argues ad hominem when one infers from the character of an arguer to the character of the arguer's conclusion. For example, Bush is an evil fuck-wit, so his claim that marriage is the most fundumental and enduring human institution is false. That would be an ad hominem argument. 'Bush is a godamn fuck-wit' is just an insult of Bush. (Not all insults are false.)
A strawman argument is not any bad argument or any argument with an implausible premise. A strawman argument takes a bad position in the neighborhood of another one, refutes the bad position and then draws a conclusion about the other argument or position. For example: "Opposition to prayer in public schools is a mere endorsement of atheism. Atheism is the endorsement of the impossibility of good and evil. Surely the government cannot endorse such amoralism. So, we should impose prayer in school." Obviously, atheism isn't amoralism, so the view that endorsement of atheism is endorsement of amoralism is a strawman.
Posted by: lenhart at July 19, 2004 02:39 PMI for one think it's time to admit we've lost the argument about "beg the question." Now there are two phrases, one a term of art in philosophy, the other widely used in the vernacular.
Or we could argue about whether someone has to own land to be a gentleman...
Posted by: FL at July 19, 2004 02:43 PMHe hates her more than I if and only if his hate for her exceeds my hate for her; he hates her more than me if and only if his hate for her exceeds his hate for me.
Posted by: lenhart at July 19, 2004 02:48 PMI for one think it's time to admit we've lost the argument about "beg the question." Now there are two phrases, one a term of art in philosophy, the other widely used in the vernacular.
Fuck that. People sit around, not knowing what 'beg the question' means, being too lazy to look it up. One of them invents answer with the faintest plausibility: it means 'raise the question'. The lazy asses impose their lazy interpretation on us. Congratulations. The lazy and ignorant win because they out number the informed or industrious. Fuck that.
Next time a linguist tells me that there are no prescriptive rules of language I'm going to fuck up the distinction between 'phoneme' and 'allophone'--a distintion not appreciated in popular use--until they get the point.
Posted by: lenhart at July 19, 2004 03:00 PMI'm going to fuck up the distinction between 'phoneme' and 'allophone'
I heard Antonio Barrera threaten to do just that on Friday Night Fights the other week. Paulie Ayala was all, "Just let him try. He's old and slow and can't get out of the way of obliterative overlaps any more. I'm gonna glottal stop him by the fifth round. He'll be a horizontal deixis, you just watch."
Barrera TKO'd him in the 10th, but I think the simulfix was in.
Posted by: apostropher at July 19, 2004 03:27 PMI'm going to infer from this post that misusing infer and imply would also annoy you; I believe I've adequately implied that it annoys me.
Posted by: DugSteen at July 19, 2004 03:53 PMYour a looser!
Seriously, don't you wish there were a way to legally require everyone to read these rules before posting?
How about rule 13:
When pointing out other people's grammar/spelling errors, first make sure the rule you are enforcing isn't imaginary.
For example, your rule #10 about sentence-ending prepositions.
With all due respect, you don't know what you're talking about.
(Or do you think that should be "about what you are talking"?) Educated native speakers end sentences with prepositions all the time, and have done so since well before Shakespeare's time. That rule is invented nonsense like the one about splitting infinitives. The only reason one should avoid ending sentences with prepositions is to avoid annoying those who were unfortunate enough to have ignorant grammar teachers ;-)
With all due respect, you don't know what you're talking about.
I doubt any respect is due. Nonetheless, you forgot half of the rule: "unless you are writing dialogue." Sentence-ending prepositions are perfectly fine if used conversationally, as you just did. But when I read it in formal writing, it sticks out like a sore thumb. Were I writing that, I would say neither "what you are talking about" nor "about what you are talking." I would say, "You are misinformed."
That's my neurosis and I'm sticking to it. [grin]
Posted by: apostropher at July 28, 2004 09:13 AM